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Arnold 2.0
In March 2006, Pam Hamlin was appointed president of Arnold's Boston headquarters office, while Pete Favat was named chief creative officer. Within three months, they had reorganized the company, which they dubbed "Arnold 2.0."
"We've started to define the vision and the organizational principles behind it," Hamlin says, "but it's still a work in progress."
Actually, the agency had been rethinking the way it does business for several years. In 2003, Arnold became one of the first agencies to eliminate separate bottom lines for its different divisions (design, direct, interactive and promotions) in favor of a single profit and loss statement.
The new Arnold took this a step further and merged the different creative departments into four cross-disciplinary teams, or "tribes." Formerly, the agency was divided into departments; now the staff is split into teams, with experts from various groups sitting together to spur creativity. One such team is the Department of Human Nature, which includes anthropologists, psychologists and cognitive scientists who work with other groups to understand how people behave and respond to media.
"Many [other] agencies are very siloed, each with a division president and P&L," Hamlin explains. "That creates internal barriers. Now all of our creative people are moved into tribes to solve problems holistically. We're trying to approach client challenges from a 360-degree view. It's about getting to a better idea faster. Arnold 2.0 is about what a modern communications company looks like."
Likewise, Folsom is trying to bring the IT department up to the next level. The infrastructure is there, he says, but the processes aren't. "The former CIO didn't communicate well with the business leaders of the company," Folsom says. "That was a problem. I needed to do things differently, so it's not me force-feeding technology. It's listening, finding out what tools people need and filling that gap. You need to be a people person, not just a technology person. People don't care about bits and bytes; they care if it's up."
At Arnold 2.0, Folsom reports to a managing partner who is the director of operations instead of the company's CFO, as he previously did. "The CFO didn't stand in the way of stuff, but a lot of times we delayed a project because of a financial impact," Folsom says. "From a people-being-productive standpoint, we couldn't push it out."
Arnold recently formed its first technology committee to help with IT planning. Folsom asked company executives who had expressed an interest in technology for their input on what sorts of tools would be helpful. "We talk to people about projects for the budget," he says. "We find out what technology we can do. We don't have a crystal ball, but we have a pretty good idea what we need. We also put something in the budget called the 'wow factor' for tools that make us better than the competition."
Last year, for example, the new analytics group invested in statistical analysis and data visualization tools -- SPSS and Xcelcisus -- that weren't originally in the budget. Folsom worked with the group to secure funding for the coming year.
"They [the analytics group] arranged a meeting one day over lunch to explain to my group what they did, how they did it and what value they were bringing to a client," Folsom notes. "It was well received, and I'm hoping to arrange the same type of informational meetings with other groups."
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